Open Pixel-art Platformer | Hacker News Reader

Open Pixel-art Platformer

github.com

35 pointsDDR014 comments

At first I wondered why this was on Hacker News (there are zillions of open source games out there) - but there is some more information in the linked forum post that makes it interesting: http://www.pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=16828&PN...

Looks like the key points are "fairly modern engine with full hardware acceleration", "it runs on darned near everything", and "a bunch of pixel-art specific features in it; we wanted to be able to do a lot of the typical pixel-art tricks you're familiar with from classic games".

It's a minimalistic game demo based on the Anura engine which is the engine of Frogatto (old-school styled platformer with pixel graphics).

Why should you be excited?

Well, the engine supports nearly every trick Bret Victor has shown in his Inventing on Principle talk. While looking really old-school it's actually rather advanced modern engine with a lot of love and advanced computer science put in it. For example it's scripting engine uses pure functional programming disguised to look like something imperative.

Shameless plug, I also work on an open-source pixel-art platformer [1]. It's written in Lua and runs on Windows, OSX, and Linux. If you're looking to learb game development, we're always looking for experienced developers to help out.

[1] https://github.com/hawkthorne/hawkthorne-journey

The immediate screenshot on the OP is a big win.

Latest checkin: "Added a toucan." :D

Ah, pixels. From technological limitation, to art.

That said, I wish there was more innovation in the genre, if that makes any sense.

If I understand correctly, the sourcecode (GPL) of the engine seems to be at:

https://github.com/anura-engine/anura

(see http://www.frogatto.com/developer for details)

Can't find the source code for the engine, so it's pretty worthless to me...this is like someone open sourcing a Unity demo, there isn't anything technical they've released just some graphics and game level maps which typically you can't reuse in your own code anyway.

The engine is open source and available at https://github.com/anura-engine/anura

Here it is... https://github.com/anura-engine/anura

.. there's no source code.

i think there is. the .cfg files include some kind of instructions, probably for the engine.

seems like this is "only" the art and the .cfg files for usage with the anura [1] engine.

[1] https://github.com/anura-engine/anura

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